State of AI
Lauren Crichton
Vice President at Sana
Lauren's fingerprints are on every moment of Summit. From the very beginning, she curated the program from start to finish, carefully researching each speaker and the current state of AI to craft a story worth telling.
Lauren Crichton, VP at Sana, backstage.
"Humans are good at acting futures into existence, if we want them enough." — Lauren Crichton
AI at work
Joel Hellermark
Founder and CEO at Sana
Self-taught in code, Joel founded Sana in 2016 at the age of 19, convinced that AI would transform how people learn and work for the better. He believed in its potential long before the wave we're all experiencing now, and still believes the best is yet to come.
and Aneel Bhusri
Founder, Chair, and CEO of Workday
Very few people can claim to be at the center of the most defining shifts in enterprise software. Aneel is one of them. As co-founder of Workday, he pioneered HR and Finance's move to the cloud, and believes the era he helped build is now unlocking something much larger.
“This is the era of the polymath. Agentic AI lets us re-found our companies from the ground up.”
Joel Hellermark
Joel Hellermark, CEO and Founder of Sana, and Aneel Bhusri, Founder, Chair, and CEO of Workday.
“This is fundamentally a new era for software." — Joel Hellermark
AGI economy
Tyler Cowen
Economist and author
One of the most influential economic thinkers of our time, Tyler has spent decades studying what drives human flourishing. At a moment when AI is rewriting the rules, there are few better guides to what comes next.
“The smarter the AI becomes, the harder it is for humans and organizations to learn how to work with it.”
Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen, back stage at the Summit
"The smarter the AI becomes, the harder it is for humans and organizations to learn how to work with it. — Tyler Cowen
Geoffrey's thesis
Geoffrey Hinton
Nobel Prize laureate and computer scientist
Most researchers believed that machines needed to mimic the way humans reason in order to think. Geoffrey Hinton thought differently, and changed the course of history.
Geoffrey Hinton with Sana's CEO and founder, Joel Hellermark.
On stage with Joel
“I don’t think there’s anything about humans that, in the end, we won’t be able to build into AIs.”
Geoffrey Hinton
Apotheosis
Benjamín Labatut
Writer
Benjamín has created a genre all his own: fiction that inhabits the minds of the scientists who altered the course of history, and asks what it cost them. His latest book traces the life of the man who helped invent the computer, the bomb, and the architecture of modern AI.
and Jasmine Sun
Tech anthropologist
If you follow the AI conversation on Substack, you've likely encountered her ideas already. Jasmine is on a mission to write the anthropology of tech: what actually happens when our industry's work meets the real world, and what it feels like to be living through it.
“People are asking how far and how fast, but no one is asking: for what?”
Benjamín Labatut
Benjamín Labatut and Jasmine Sun, on stage at the Summit
AI is life
Sara Imari Walker
Astrobiologist
Technology is not alive. It is life. A statement like this requires a paradigm shift in our understanding of one of the most profound open mysteries of the universe: what makes us, or anything, alive. Sara is one of the few scientists in the world with a theory bold enough to answer it.
“Technology is not replacing life, it is life.”
Sara Imari Walker
Working theory
Anu Atluru
Essayist and technologist
Some of the internet's most thought-provoking essays on technology and human ambition have come from Anu. Her latest working theory tackles the question beneath all of it: when AI can do most of what we call work, what remains for us?
“I’m willing to bet we’re going to see much more of this word ‘soul’ coming soon—it summarizes the thing that machines don’t have.”
Anu Atluru
